Taxonomy term

citizen science

Juno carries a visible light camera, JunoCam, which is intended primarily to take photos that, it’s hoped, will provoke public interest in Jupiter. The images sent back are available for anyone to download and manipulate for scientific or artistic purposes. Thousands of images, both raw and manipulated, have been made available for viewing, and hundreds of citizen scientists have been engaged in the project. Scientists say they are delighted at how JunoCam has resonated and increased interest in, and understanding of, the Juno mission. See www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam.

In 2015 and 2016, more than 30 reports of odd, purple-hued ribbons of light over southern Canada popped up in forums on Aurorasaurus, a citizen science project funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation that tracks the aurora borealis through user-submitted reports and tweets. The amateur astronomers nicknamed the strange phenomenon “Steve,” and in a new study, researchers have defined the new type of aurora.

The Raspberry Shake — a personal seismograph invented in 2016 and named after the computer that powers the instrument (the Raspberry Pi) — was intended for hobbyists. But the device’s usefulness quickly became apparent to a much wider audience, including scientists and educators around the world.

At a time when the technical and computing capabilities of science are evolving at breakneck speeds, it might seem like researchers would always seek out more powerful and sophisticated tools to tackle their scientific questions. But some have chosen the opposite strategy: drawing on the dispersed resource of millions of relatively low-tech devices like smartphones and personal computers — and their users.

The rapid proliferation of 3-D printing technology that began in the early 2000s sent ripples of excitement through the tech world and beyond despite the initial high price of printers. Now, more affordable printers have broken this barrier, and geoscientists have started testing the waters.

In this era of high-tech seismic networks and GPS, scientists still rely on low-tech earthquake intensity scales, generated from public surveys like the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Did You Feel It? questionnaire, to characterize ground shaking in places with low instrument coverage. But how accurate are people’s perceptions of shaking?

Stars, just like people, have finite life spans. Some die quietly. Others go out in a blaze of glory, as supernovae. These brilliant explosions are sometimes visible from Earth, but most appear as only a faint twinkle.